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St Felix sits just off busy
Hamilton Road in this jolly Edwardian
seaside town. Felixstowe is usually
ignored by explorers of Suffolk, which is
a great pity, since it contains much of
interest from the last 100 years or so.
There is Suffolk's largest hotel, there
is also Suffolk's finest Victorian
church, St
John the Baptist,
and England's first reinforced concrete
church, St
Andrew, as well as a host
of fascinating domestic architecture,
especially from the 1890s and 1930s. St
Felix does not stand out like these
famous churches, but has a quiet,
dignified presence behind its courtyard
and wrought iron fence, with the
presbytery to the left and fine modern
hall to the right. This is in a dynamic
form of Suffolk vernacular, and replaced
a smaller hall which the parish had
outgrown. St Felix was built in a
restrained Gothic style, at that moment
when Decorated became Perpendicular
towards the end of the 14th century -
except, of course, that this is actually
an early 20th century building, and was
not subject to the Anglican scrutiny of a
Phipson or
a Cautley,
and so breaks the rules rather
delightfully.
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The
original church on this site was built in 1899,
when Felixstowe was a far outpost of the Diocese
of Northampton, a town which few parishioners
here can ever have visited. Before that, Mass had
been said upstairs in a tea room on the Orwell
Road. The first church was where the presbytery
is now, and it was a wooden hut, although later
photographs show it covered, rather attractively,
with ivy. The original plans for the new church
were grand indeed, and incorporated a presbytery
for three priests and two live-in servants!
However, the current church was built in 1912,
largely to the designs of Suffolk architect
Francis Banham - with one major exception, as we
will see.
We
enter through the west porch, and are faced with
several sets of double doors, glazed to create a Galilee effect.
This porch was built as recently as 1958; until
then, the west end incorporated two vast,
barn-like doors which opened directly into the
nave, roughly where the inner doors are today.
The one problem with Banham's design was the
grand mock-Tudor west end, with its squat tower.
It became clear fairly early on that this would
never be built, and, in any case, the current
west end is much more fitting. There is a
baptistry tucked in to the south side, with a
most elegant font. You step into a wide, squarish
nave, your eyes
instantly drawn to the fine east window, an
external view of which is, unfortunately, rather
difficult to obtain. It shows the 15 mysteries of
the Rosary, and was reset in the 1980s. As with
the rest of the glass in the church, it is the
work of Hardman & Co, and this is the largest
collection of that workshop's output in all East
Anglia.

A
modern, Vatican II altar sits towards the nave,
replacing a grand, east-facing sanctuary that
survived barely ten years. Even while it was
being fitted out in 1963, the bishops in the
Vatican were opening the windows, and letting the
fresh air blow in. The Catholic Church would be
different from now on. Either side of the nave
are narrow aisles beyond the
arcades, and the
stone crossbeams of the aisle roofs are extended
downwards to contain Stations of the Cross. This
is most effective, I think; we are used to seeing
them on south and north walls, but here you get a
real sense of a processional way beneath them. In
fact, this is a fairly recent development, and
they were in heavy wooden frames on the outer
walls until a few years ago. At the east end of
the north aisle is a Sacred Heart altar, and the
south aisle ends in a little Lady chapel. Turning
west, the church is full of light and space, with
its high roof and gallery.
Before the Reformation, this
parish was divided between the parishes
of St
Peter and St Paul, Old Felixstowe, a
mile to the east, and St Mary Walton, a
half mile the other side of Hamilton
Road. But after the priests there were
swept away, it was 350 years before a
Catholic sacramental presence returned to
this place. Today, a board of priests of
the parish hangs in the nave - a rare
thing in a Catholic church, but a good
thing. This is a lively parish, and has
seeded itself into neighbouring Trimley,
where Suffolk's most modern Catholic
church, St
Cecilia, will be found.
The parish also includes the Convent
of Jesus and Mary -
coincidentally, in Orwell Road, where
this parish celebrated its first
post-Reformation masses in a tea shop
more than 100 years ago. The
Catholic Church is very good at
dedicating its churches appropriately,
taking local history and devotion into
account. So, in Suffolk, we have St
Etheldreda at Newmarket, for example, and
St Edmund at Bury. Although it is
unlikely that the town of Felixstowe
itself is named after St Felix - more
likely, it takes its name from Fylthestow,
meaning a place where something is cut,
probably trees, or perhaps meadowgrass -
there is a local connection with
St Felix. The neighbouring parish of
Walton contained Walton Castle,
which was probably the Dumnoc
where he first came ashore to convert the
heathen English, and the place he
established his See, before moving on to
the wilds of Norfolk.
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